Neighbors Say Suspect in Chapel Hill Shootings Was Threatening

The coffin of one of three young Muslims who were shot in Chapel Hill, N.C., this week was carried to a funeral prayer service on Thursday in Raleigh, N.C.Credit
Travis Dove for The New York Times

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Neighbors knew Craig Stephen Hicks. He was the angry man on Summerwalk Circle, they said — irritated about noise, irascible about parking, hostile to religion. And armed.

Mr. Hicks was such a disruptive presence in the Finley Forest condominium complex that last year, residents held a meeting to talk about him.

None of them, of course, could have foreseen that he might be charged with murdering three people in a neighboring apartment on Tuesday: two sisters, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Yusor’s husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat — all of them Muslim. But some neighbors felt threatened by his behavior.

“I have seen and heard him be very unfriendly to a lot of people in this community,” said Samantha Maness, a resident of the complex. She said that Mr. Hicks had displayed “equal opportunity anger” and that “he kind of made everyone feel uncomfortable and unsafe.”

Ms. Maness said Mr. Hicks would often seek to have cars towed from the complex’s lot, either because they did not have stickers or because he did not recognize them. And she said he would complain about noise — he was upset when she and her friends were playing a card game and he thought they were too noisy, and he was again upset when she pulled into the lot with music playing loudly in her car.

“He was definitely aggressive, and he spoke harshly when he was upset,” she said.

The police say they never received any formal complaints, but Mr. Hicks, a 46-year-old former auto parts dealer who has been studying to become a paralegal, appears to have functioned as a self-appointed watchman in the complex. The Chapel Hill police released a report about a 2013 incident in which he apparently called them to complain that someone had allegedly grabbed a tow-truck driver’s arm while he was trying to tow a car. And just last month, he wrote on Facebook that he had called the police because he saw a couple having sex in a car in the parking lot.

Public records reveal only the barest of details about Mr. Hicks, who turned himself in after the shooting. He appears to have moved around the country several times. He voted in two recent North Carolina elections, once as a Democrat and once on a nonpartisan ballot. He has been divorced twice. His current wife, Karen Hicks, is now planning to seek a divorce, according to her lawyer, Rob Maitland.

“She doesn’t feel safe,” Mr. Maitland said. “She is outraged and heartbroken over all of this.”

Mr. Hicks’s Facebook page suggests that he has a strong interest in atheism and is contemptuous of religion; the page is filled with posts and cartoons mocking the intelligence of people who believe in the Bible. His anger appeared to be aimed primarily at Christians — in fact, in 2010 he decried as hypocritical opposition by Christians to a much-debated proposal for a mosque to be built near ground zero in Manhattan.

He also indicated that he was proud of owning a weapon: Last month, he posted an image of a gun on a scale with the words, “Yes, that is 1 pound 5.1 ounces for my loaded 38 revolver, its holster, and five extra rounds in a speedloader.”

Yusor Abu-Salha and Mr. Barakat had also been accosted by Mr. Hicks before.

“This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt,” said the sisters’ father, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha. “They were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far.”

“Right after we left, Yusor heard a knock at the door, and it was Hicks," the friend, Amira Ata, told the media company Fusion. Mr. Hicks complained about extra cars in the neighborhood and of noise from the Risk game, she said. “While he was at the door talking to Yusor, he was holding a rifle, she told me later. He didn’t point it at anyone, but he still had it.”

A former roommate of Mr. Barakat’s was also aware of the threatening behavior, generally over use of visitor parking spaces.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“He would come over to the door, knock on the door and then have a gun on his hip, saying, ‘You guys need to not park here,’ ” Imad Ahmad, the former roommate, told The Associated Press. “He did it again after they got married.”

The condominium complex is near the University of North Carolina, and the high number of students living in the complex contributed to parking and noise concerns. Students tend to live several to an apartment and are often out, or up, late.

Within the complex, even some residents who had not interacted with Mr. Hicks said they had heard about the confrontations over his efforts to control parking or noise levels.

“I didn’t really know him — I just saw him out when I walked my dog — but I knew he had some problems with other neighbors,” said Patricia Jordan, a resident of the complex.

Mr. Hicks’s behavior as a neighbor has become central to a debate about whether the killings were a hate crime — a possibility still being investigated by the local police. Ms. Hicks insisted that her husband’s political views showed that he was not bigoted: She has emphasized that he supports same-sex marriage, abortion rights and racial equality.

“He often champions, on his Facebook page, for the rights of many individuals,” said Ms. Hicks, who said she had been married to Mr. Hicks for seven years. “That’s just one of the things I know about him, is everyone is equal.”

Cynthia Hurley, who said she was married to Mr. Hicks years ago, said she had been unsettled by his enthusiasm for a 1993 film, “Falling Down,” which depicts a man violently lashing out at society. “That always freaked me out,” Ms. Hurley told The A.P. “He watched it incessantly. He thought it was hilarious. He had no compassion at all.”

Mr. Hicks is enrolled at Durham Technical Community College, working toward earning “multiple certifications in our paralegal technologies program,” according to a spokeswoman for the school, Carver Weaver. Ms. Weaver said in an email that Mr. Hicks was “a student in good standing and has been since fall 2012.”

A paralegal instructor at Durham Tech, Susan Sutton, confirmed in a telephone call her previous comments to a local news media organization that Mr. Hicks was a bright, conscientious, good student, and said there had been no sign that anything was wrong.

A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2015, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Accused of Murder, Remembered as Threatening. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe